MEDIA REVIEWS
ALBUM
under his belt wouldn’t be a little more sophisticated than the
cock rock of the hungry kid looking for a record deal in ’ 75.
Further, whereas Eddie used to inspire us with a fearless spontaneity that depended on almost nothing but a guitar (electric
or acoustic), a raging but fairly run-of-the-mill (for the time)
Marshall, a flanger or phaser, and an echo, he now has his own
brand of guitars, amps, and effects—and he could tap any engineer or producer in the business—and yet his recorded tones
today often sound processed and too hi-fi. To be clear, the tones
aren’t bad, and I’m not saying Eddie should be plugging into any
other brand of gear, but as those old demos and bootlegs prove,
Donn Landee and other engineers brought a magical something
to Eddie’s recorded tones that hasn’t been there since 1984.
In addition, while past VH work tended to stick in your
head because of the songs and the pyrotechnics, this time
around “Blood and Fire,” “You and Your Blues,” and “Tattoo,”
with its heavily harmonized chorus, are the only ones that
seem to do so (and “Tattoo” doesn’t do so for good reasons,
either). The fault is mostly Roth’s: Nearly every time he
opens his mouth, his strident, perma-vibrato histrionics and
creepy Vegas-lounge-act shtick craps all over everything—in
your mind’s eye, you can see his perma-grin face mugging for
cameras at every turn. One of the only hints at his formerly
untouchable frontman glory comes in the final seconds of “Stay
Frosty”—perhaps the album’s most inanely lyric’d tune—when
he lets loose with a circa-’ 78 “On Fire”-style scream that most
of us thought him no longer capable of.
Truth’s most memorable moments are dizzying technical
displays during solos and breakdowns. These parts have a lot of
verve—you can really tell Ed, bass-playing son Wolfgang, and
Alex are stoked to finally be kicking out new jams—but even the
admittedly raging solos and breakdowns are usually bookended by
verses and choruses that feel like a cleverly crafted mélange of riffs
from past albums and the aforementioned bootlegs and demos.
(For example, the beginning of the “As Is” solo sounds exactly like
the first tapping section of “Eruption,” and there are numerous
examples of the same old ascending tremolo-picked licks we’ve
heard a zillion times over). There’s also a fair amount of wah-pedal work that often sounds very Satriani-like. That’s no slam on
Satch, but that’s not what I want my EVH to sound like.
Eddie’s most adventurous moments come when he plugs into
an effect we’ve not heard him use before. The wild, spiraling
rotary-speaker tones on “Bullethead” provide one of the album’s
rare, death-defying thrill rides. Similarly, “Honeybabysweetiedoll”
begins with wonky weirdness—like EVH’s rig is sending scrambled communiqués to an alien spacecraft—and then finds Ed
summoning potent dropped-D fury accentuated by gloriously
bristling feedback and Whammy-pedal wailing. Other bright
spots include Alex Van Halen’s trademark galloping double-bass-drum grooves on “China Town,” which somehow sound as fresh,
if not particularly as original, as they did on “Hot for Teacher”
and “Mine All Mine.” And the middle section of “China Town”
even has a badass solo section where a deftly shredding Wolfie
gives us a hint at what his pop would sound like jamming with
Billy Sheehan (think “Elephant Gun”).
